Futuristic Aerie with a Park View

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FRIDAY, MAY 11, 2012

Futuristic Aerie With a Park View

By CAROL VOGEL For the past 15 summers the Met’s “Tomás Saraceno on the Roof: about a dozen installers assembling his most spinning around from the perspec- roof garden has been the setting for tra- creation, which he described as “an in- N Tomás Saraceno’s imagination his Cloud City” opens Tuesday at the tive inside this giant futuristic construc- ditional sculptures by artists like Ells- ternational space station.” As pieces be- constellation of 16 joined modules Metropolitan Museum of Art. tion. worth Kelly, Jeff Koons and, last year, gan to be set in place, Mr. Saraceno under construction on the roof of Like many of Mr. Saraceno’s installa- Anthony Caro. It has also been a place sneaked a visitor inside and up a twisty tions “Cloud City” is his vision of float- I the Metropolitan Museum of Art to walk up a winding bamboo pathway gonal habitat of reflective stainless steel staircase about 20 feet above the roof ing or flying cities — places that defy will take off in a heavy puff of wind and that soared some 50 feet in an untradi- and acrylic. garden. Some of the floors were trans- float over Central Park. “The whole conventional notions of space, time and tional installation that invited visitor Called “Cloud City,” it is the largest of parent, and the walls were mirrored gravity. “You can have a feeling of thing will go into orbit,” Mr. Saraceno, participation. But perhaps the most un- Mr. Saraceno’s 10-year-old series, steel, acrylic or open to the air. Sudden- weightlessness that’s a bit disorient- the Argentine artist who made it, said expected environment of all is taking “Cloud Cities/Air Port City.” He was on ly buildings, people and trees were up- on a recent foggy morning. shape there now: a dizzying multipoly- the roof this week supervising a team of side down or sideways, sometimes al- Continued on Page 30

A Painter Stripped Bare

According to many critics, Lucian Freud start- Lucian Freud Drawings The works on display ed making great paintings only after he let go of at Acquavella Galleries, including the 1948 drawing: abandoning flat, crisply outlined fig- self-portrait below, span eight decades ures for massively fleshy nudes KAREN nourished by a full brush. The qui- of this artist’s life. etly ravishing “Lucian Freud ROSENBERG Drawings,” at Acquavella Galler- flowed between his paintings and his works on ies, gives Freud’s works on paper paper. ART REVIEW a chance to speak for themselves, The exhibition comes to Acquavella from beginning with his childhood Blain/Southern in London, where it accompa- sketches and ending with the last etching plate nied a Freud retrospective at the National Por- he touched. trait Gallery. It has been organized by William What they tell us is that Freud (1922-2011) kept Feaver, the curator of Freud’s retrospectives at on drawing, and that, to the last, energy still Tate Britain (2002) and the Museo Correr in Venice (2005), who consulted closely with the artist until his death at 88 last July. It includes some small oil portraits and power- ful examples of Freud’s work in etching (which isn’t exactly drawing but is close enough to de- serve our scrutiny here, some five years after the Museum of Modern Art’s “Lucian Freud: The Painter’s Etchings” established his mastery of the medium.) “Lucian Freud Drawings” starts early, perhaps a little too early. The oldest work, “Birds in Tree,” dates from about 1930 and was, as Mr. RUTH FREMSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES Feaver notes, exhibited in a 1938 show of “child art” at Peggy Guggenheim’s London gallery. Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations A video of Miuccia Prada plays behind outfits she and More revealing than this precocious scribble Elsa Schiaparelli designed at this Costume Institute exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. of conté crayon, however, are bristly pen drawings from around 1940: twinned figures (“Two Boys Lying Down”) and family members (“The Painter’s Mother”). Here too are comparatively Speaking of Fashion tender animal studies: dead birds and monkeys, living horses. As is often remarked, Freud’s portraits of the The Metropolitan Museum of Art won’t have chosen subject is far from a dry one. to stay open till midnight to accommodate In the fashion field, as opposed to the field of Continued on Page 31 PRIVATE COLLECTION, LUCIAN FREUD ARCHIVE crowds for “Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible fine art, women have always been, are even ex- Conversations,” this year’s Costume Institute pected to be, alpha figures; protean creators, extravaganza, mainly because the show isn’t all consequential personalities, imperious com- Inside that extravagant, certainly not on the manders of craftsmanly troops. These two de- HOLLAND order of the Alexander McQueen ex- signers certainly fill the bill. hibition last year. Both were born in Italy, Schiaparelli (pro- ART REVIEW 28 COTTER It’s on the small side. It has a tight nounced SKYAP-a-relli) in Rome in 1890, Ms. thesis, comparing and contrasting Prada in Milan in 1949. Both were from old, con- Édouard Vuillard, from the avant-garde to the ART REVIEW work by two designers of different servative families, and both went rogue early haut-bourgeois. Ken Johnson reviews. generations. And it carries that idea on. As a young woman Schiaparelli shocked her through with the careful, even wonkish earnest- parents by writing sexy poems and taking a BOOK REVIEW 25 ness of an end-of-year term paper. nanny job in London. Ms. Prada, a child of the Aliens in the womb and other strange tales Still, that it takes its task seriously is refresh- 1960s, mounted the leftist political barriers with ing; you don’t always find this in fashion exhibi- her peers. from Anne Enright. Dwight Garner reviews. tion. And, with the designers under appraisal be- Both came to fashion almost by accident, and ing Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada, the Continued on Page 26 PRIVATE COLLECTION C M Y K Nxxx,2012-05-11,C,031,Bs-4C,E1

THE NEW YORK TIMES, FRIDAY, MAY 11, 2012 N C31

ABOVE AND BELOW LEFT: PRIVATE COLLECTION, LUCIAN FREUD ARCHIVE; BELOW CENTER: MATTHEW MARKS GALLERY, LUCIAN FREUD ARCHIVE; BELOW RIGHT: PRIVATE COLLECTION, STEPHEN ONGPIN FINE ART, LONDON, LUCIAN FREUD ARCHIVE The collection of Freud works at Acquavella Galleries includes vividly colored pieces in conté crayon like “Chicken on a Bamboo Table” (1944) and a few oil works like “Small Garden” (1997), above right. Below, from left, the drawings on display include a louche “Study of Francis Bacon” (1951), “The Painter’s Mother” (1940) and “Boy in a Red and Blue Jacket” (1945). A Painter Stripped Bare in Decades of Drawings

From Weekend Page 23 ONLINE: LUCIAN FREUD mid-1940s bear some resemblance to More of the artist’s drawings on Neue Sachlichkeit works by George display at Acquavella: Grosz, Otto Dix and Christian Schad. nytimes.com/design Witness the icy, blue-eyed stare of “Boy on a Sofa,” or the spiky hair and aloof deep contours and webbed patches of a mien of “La Voisine (The Neighbour).” well-known 1993 etching of the bulging But other influences, notably Picasso cranium of Leigh Bowery, for instance, and Ingres, can be discerned in “Boy in find their way into quick sketches of a Red and Blue Jacket” and in a marvel- heads (Isaiah Berlin, John Richardson, ous pair of studies of Francis Bacon Balthus). strutting around with an open shirt and You can tell that Freud found etching trouser fly, from 1951. more exciting than drawing on paper. It was Bacon who transformed The uncertainty of the printing process Freud’s painting, persuading him to ex- appealed to him; as he said, “You can’t periment with thick hog-bristle brushes. tell how it will be.” We’ll never know He seems to have had an equally radical how his last plate, “Head of Jeremy impact on Freud’s drawing; in these King,” might have turned out, though it studies it’s as if Bacon’s swashbuckling, looks promising: a long, craggy face sexually aggressive presence forced that seems to sit right on the knot of a Freud to loosen up a little. We are a long stiff necktie. way from the tightly wound “Man at the 1970s and ’80s, skipping a decade or ished paintings: Turner’s “Sun Rising drawing, which faithfully records its But drawing, he knew, had its own Night: Self-Portrait” of 1947-8, with its so during which Freud focused almost Through Vapour,” or Freud’s own subject’s thinning hair and drooping risks of failure. As he told the writer tedious stippling. entirely on painting. When he returned “Large Interior WII (After Watteau).” head. At the same time, the shift from Martin Gayford in 2010: “Being able to At this point the show leaps ahead to to drawing, it was, as Mr. Feaver writes, The results can be awfully poignant, painting to the more intimate medium draw well is the hardest thing — far “both in the paintings and a reaction or as when a small painting of Freud’s de- of drawing restores a modicum of digni- harder than painting, as one can easily “Lucian Freud Drawings” continues counterpoint to them.” pressive mother from 1972 is paired ty. see from the fact that there are so few through June 9 at Acquavella Galleries, Soft strokes of charcoal lay the with a drawing of her from 1983. The The end of the show finds Freud fully great draftsmen compared to the num- 18 East 79th Street, Manhattan; groundwork for small, probing oil por- signs of aging, already apparent in the absorbed in etching and transferring ber of great painters — Ingres, Degas, (212) 734-6300, acquavellagalleries.com. traits. Or drawings emerge from fin- painting, have been accentuated in the some of its lessons to his drawings. The Van Gogh, Rembrandt, just a few.” A Portrait of the Artist As an Old Man in Love

Life was sweet for Picasso during his 10 years of romance and cohabitation Picasso and Françoise Gilot with Françoise Gilot, from 1943 to 1953. Paris-Vallauris, 1943-1953 Or so it would seem, judging by “Picas- so and Françoise Gilot: Paris-Vallauris, Gagosian Gallery 1943-1953,” a wonderful exhi- KEN bition at Gagosian Gallery. The Picasso of these years rocious analytic intellect, he was drawn JOHNSON — he was in his 60s and ear- to the mythic and the archetypal on the ly 70s — seems to revel in one hand and endlessly fascinated by ART the ways and means of painting on the REVIEW the joys of family and domesticity. Gone are the other. moonstruck years with Marie-Thérèse He was certainly inspired by the Walter and the violently conflicted ones spectacle of his children at play. “Enfant with Dora Maar. The crazy-old-man last Dans Sa Voiture” (1949) is a delightfully act is yet to come. Looking at pictures zany painting in red, white, blue and here of his young children Claude and gray of an infant in a stroller. The Paloma at play, you can imagine your- baby’s head is twisted and flattened into self seeing through the eyes of a loving, a blob with displaced googly eyes, its benevolent father — who just happens chubby arms and hands pointing this to be the most inventive artist of the way and that, and the wheels and other 20th century. parts of its vehicle reconfigured into a There may be other stories to tell geometric jumble. There is an infectious about the Françoise years. Ms. Gilot exuberance here that owes as much to told one in her invaluable memoir, “Life the idea of the child as an agent of cen- With Picasso” (1964). The tale told by trifugal energy as to the whirly, Cubist dynamics. this exhibition is the product of dialogue Sometimes abstraction and bodily between Ms. Gilot, now 90, and John gesture are neatly unified. In a painting Richardson, Picasso’s biographer and from 1953, Paloma, age 3 or 4, sits on a the curator of previous crowd-pleasing red rug that fills the canvas. She leans Picasso shows at Gagosian, including forward on legs folded under her at a “Picasso: Mosqueteros” in 2009 and seemingly impossible angle, supporting “Picasso and Marie-Thérèse: L’Amour herself on one straight arm and reach- Fou” last year. ing with the other to slap a sausage-fin- Ms. Gilot is the subject of many por- gered paw on a yellow toy in the fore- traits picturing her not as a pneumatic TOP, 2012 FRANCOISE GILOT, ALI ELAI/CAMERA ARTS INC. — GAGOSIAN GALLERY, PRIVATE COLLECTION ground. Rendered with wide brushes, ABOVE AND BOTTOM LEFT, 2012 PABLO PICASSO/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK, MAURICE AESCHIMANN — GAGOSIAN GALLERY, PRIVATE COLLECTION odalisque or a weeping harpy but as a Françoise Gilot’s “Picasso’s Face the features of her round face defined beauty of regal bearing, queen of the by black lines and her cheeks spotted “Femme au Fauteuil N. 1 (d’Après le Rouge),” 1949, one of Picasso’s works house. Picasso’s angry and mean side is (Portrait From Memory),” 1945, top, depicting his lover Françoise Gilot as a regal beauty in serene domesticity. and Picasso’s “Enfant Dans Sa bright red, she embodies the kind of not completely in abeyance; there are concentrated, albeit momentary urgen- some female monsters on canvas here, Voiture, February 20, 1949,” above. cy of intention and desire that is so but they mostly tend to the comical side. characteristic of little children and, not the 30 paintings here, including natural- show answers. But one of two land- “Femme Nue Sur Fond Bleu” (1946), a incidentally, of Picasso himself, whose istic portraits of herself and her grand- scapes by him here is suggestive. In the painting of something resembling a own attention span tended to be short from 1946 explains. Fine lines and curvy mother, Cubist still lifes and abstrac- wildly animated scene of “Paysage sculpture made of rounded, gray boul- but intense. planes define a Cubist-style image of a tions and pictures of herself and her d’Hiver” (1950), each of two gnarly, ders assembled into a vaguely female During this period Picasso got into woman with a knife in one hand and the leafless trees in the foreground reaches form by the people of some prehistoric painting pottery and making small clay children, you might think for a moment civilization, is more funny than terrify- bovine head of the Minotaur held by the sculptures of women. He also explored that you are looking at more Picassos. a branch toward the other, almost ing. other. Beauty has vanquished the trou- lithography in depth, mainly in the form But that impression is quickly dis- touching, as if with index fingers. Roll- Curiously, there are almost no self- blemaking beast. of black-and-white portraits of Ms. pelled by the overfinished quality of her ing, striped green fields in the middle portraits (assuming, that is, that you do The numerous images of children Gilot. Both directions are well repre- work. Ms. Gilot clearly was a competent distance lead to a couple of ramshackle not view everything he made as self- stand out especially, because they are sented here, and they attest to a cre- painter, but whereas, with Picasso, it farm buildings standing on the horizon portraiture). Picasso seems less pre- so uncommon in art of the avant-garde, ative drive that was either compulsive seems that every painting is an adven- line under a gloomy, gray sky that occupied by his self and its conflicts for which having and raising offspring or unfathomable, and always impatient- ture, every mark or stroke the registra- threatens stormy weather. than at other times. Maybe a painting has never been a high priority. A few ly alive to the next possibility of any giv- tion of a thought or an impulse in real It could be an illustration for “Wuth- decades ago this phase of Picasso’s art en medium. time, her works resemble dutifully com- ering Heights,” if that Gothic romance “Picasso and Françoise Gilot” continues was routinely dismissed as sentimental The exhibition includes a selection of pleted assignments for a class in how to had been set in Spain, and it might be a through June 30 at the Gagosian Gallery, kitsch. In truth, there is a high sugar works by Ms. Gilot, who was an artist at paint like Picasso. truer portrait of the spiritual marriage 980 Madison Avenue, near 77th Street; content. But emotional nuance was not 21, when she met Picasso, and contin- What was life with Picasso really of Pablo and Françoise than anything (212) 744-2313, gagosian.com. Picasso’s strength; a caveman with a fe- ued to be after leaving him. Looking at like? That is not a question that this else in the exhibition. C M Y K Nxxx,2012-05-11,C,027,Bs-4C,E1

THE NEW YORK TIMES, FRIDAY, MAY 11, 2012 N C27 Art in Review

al Art, in session this weekend at foreclosure organizing. Rotimi Fani-Kayode Arader Gallery, 1016 Madison Av- On May 19 Mr. Colo will per- ‘Nothing to Lose’ enue (between 78th and 79th form “Sweeping Memories,” a rit- Streets), and several individual ual cleansing of the Exit Art The Walther Collection Project shows, like so many intercon- premises, which will thereafter Space nected islands, dotting the Upper be converted into a new gallery 526 West 26th Street, Chelsea East Side. HOLLAND COTTER by Sean Kelly, a dealer in Chel- Through July 28 sea. But this documentary sur- “Black, African, homosexual vey, organized by Rachel Gugel- photography” was how the Nige- ‘Every Exit Is an En- berger, with Lauren Rosati and rian-born artist Rotimi Fani- Lauren Graves, shouldn’t be Kayode described his work. And trance’ missed. Get your history while it’s still warm. although little seen at the time of ‘30 Years of Exit Art’ his death from AIDS in London in HOLLAND COTTER 1989, at 34, his pictures have be- Exit Art come classic examples of the 475 10th Avenue (at 36th Street), kind of rethinking and re-experi- Manhattan Anne Arnold encing of identity that was trans- Through May 19 ‘Sculpture From forming art three decades ago. This big archival survey docu- Four Decades’ Fani-Kayode’s family moved to ments the history of one of the England from Nigeria as political premier nonprofit spaces in Man- Alexandre Gallery exiles in 1966. He went to school hattan, founded in 1982 by Jea- 41 East 57th Street, Manhattan in the United States — George- nette Ingberman and Papo Colo. Through June 8 town University in Washington, After Ms. Ingberman’s death last In the 1950s, when Abstract Ex- Pratt Institute in Brooklyn — CHRISTOPHER ESPINOSA FERNANDEZ/EXIT ART year, Mr. Colo decided to close pressionism was casting its tri- then settled in London. There, “Every Exit Is an Entrance: 30 Years of Exit Art” is that exhibition space’s final installation. the gallery, and this summing-up umphal shadow over American sometimes in collaboration with show will be its last. art and David Smith was making his partner, Alex Hirst (who died In three successive spaces, in- monuments out of industrial in 1994), he created a series of cluding the present one, Exit Art steel, Anne Arnold (born in 1925) studio tableaus combining as- organized a long series of impor- created smart and humorous pects of African and Western cul- tant solo exhibitions by figures sculptures of dogs, people and tures. like David Hammons, Adrian other domestic creatures, and In his last two series, “Nothing Piper, David Wojnarowicz and she continued on her own way for to Lose” and “Every Minute Martin Wong early on, to the im- the next three decades. In this Counts,” excerpts from which pressive young Puerto Rican art- delightful, crowded show of 27 make up most of the Walther Col- ist Charles Juhasz-Alvarado in pieces from the ’50s to the late lection show, single figures, ANNE ARNOLD, D. JAMES DEE/ALEXANDRE GALLERY, NEW YORK 2008. All of these artists are rep- ’80s, the tension is between the sometimes the artist himself, resented in the current roundup, seeming liveliness of the animals adorned with paint, feathers and Above, “Orange Cat” from 1956, made of wooden blocks, although the show’s real interest and the obviously nonliving ma- flowers, perform what look like lies in humbler, more ephemeral terials they are made of, includ- unidentified rituals. Partly they by Anne Arnold. Right, one of material — posters, news releas- ing wood, clay and bronze. You seem meant to refer to Yoruba re- the African masks on display es and photographs of the huge might pause a beat before recog- ligious culture, but some also at the Tribal Art New York group shows for which Exit Art nizing a 1956 construction of rec- read as burlesques of Western fair, at the Fletcher-Sinclair became well known — that pro- tangular wooden blocks painted ethnographic photographs of the Mansion in Manhattan. vides the month-to-month, year- bright orange as a cat lying on its “primitive.” to-year record of the gallery’s life back with its feet in the air. The There is, however, nothing es- over changing times. effect of something so obviously sentially reactive in Fani- display assembled by Visser Gal- The group shows were often artificial appearing so lifelike is Kayode’s art. It is imaginatively lery from Belgium. Upstairs, a political in content, though some- funny and mysterious. theatrical, inventively erotic and Baule carving of a male spirit times obliquely so. The first of In the ’70s Ms. Arnold made a radical, positive departure from spouse from Berz Gallery, of San them, the 1982 “Illegal America,” life-size and bigger sculptures by the photographic images of Afri- Francisco, creates the opposite tackled censorship well in ad- wrapping canvas over wooden cans — largely passive and docu- dynamic: slender, about a foot vance of the culture wars to armatures. Painted the color of mentary — that prevailed in the high, with a large head and a come. The 2002 “Reactions,” as- pink marble, “Bill (Horse)” rep- West up to that time. He unrav- teardrop beard, it’s magnetically sembled through an open call on resents the front half of a horse eled the very notion that such a intimate rather than overpower- the Internet, ended up being one with splayed forelegs struggling thing as “African” even existed. ing. of the art world’s few truly inter- to stand. Some works have Pop That he accomplished this in a The Songye figure says: bow. national responses to the events Art in their DNA; the sculptor career of barely six years is both The Baule figure says: kiss. of 9/11. Fittingly, for a gallery that Marisol comes to mind. But most the joy of his art and the sadness Galeria Guilhem Montagut, on practiced and thrived on coopera- are too naturalistic to be taken of it. HOLLAND COTTER a first New York trip from Barce- tive creativity, a final program of only for signs. A carved-wood cat lona, has brought a classic Fang performance art will include, sitting with one lifted paw ancestor figure. Squat and mus- through Saturday, work by the glances our way with typically fe- Tribal Art New York cular, it looks like an infant wres- PRIVATE COLLECTION, NEW YORK collective called Not an Alterna- line disinterest. A ceramic dachs- tive, working with two other hund with pleading eyes standing Fletcher-Sinclair Mansion tler, its skin gleaming with ments from Peru and ceramic the character of the fair, with its groups, Organizing for Occupa- up on its hind legs projects that 2 East 79th Street, Manhattan rubbed-in oil. There’s a similar pots from across Africa. Although array of difference under one tion (O4O) and members of the irresistible sense of personality Through Sunday piece at Galerie Flak, a Parisian the pots all share a basic globular roof. It’s worth noting, by the visitor, though the main attrac- Occupy Wall Street movement, that makes so many people fools When it first appeared at the form, they are unalike in every way, that there’s a second fair, tion here is a heart-faced female on issues of eviction defense and for their pets. KEN JOHNSON Seventh Avenue Armory several other way, and together reflect called Madison Ancient and Trib- image, carved in low relief, paint- years ago, the Tribal Art Fair was ed and hailing from another a polycultural continent unto it- world: Papua New Guinea. self. After the Armory became At these galleries, “tribal” unavailable, the fair dissolved spans a lot of geographic turf. But into an archipelago of individual some dealers are specific in their shows scattered across town. interests. Now re-established by the art Earl W. Duncan, from Stilwell, dealer Maureen Zarember and Kan., specializes in Native Amer- renamed Tribal Art New York, ican material, as does Jeffrey My- it’s convening again, in smaller ers, who for decades has spent form, with more than a dozen gal- part of every year in Alaska on leries gathered in the wood-pan- the trail of the tiny ancient ivories eled rooms of the Fletcher-Sin- he shows. Claudia Giangola and clair Mansion on the Upper East John Menser are in charge of the Side. fair’s pre-Columbian corner; Africa leads the way with their Olmec jade mask is an exhi- carved-wood sculpture. bition highlight. Gail Martin Gal- A big, commanding Songye fig- lery returns us to continent-leap- ure dominates the ground-floor ing, with antique textile frag-

ROTIMI FANI-KAYODE/THE WALTHER COLLECTION AND AUTOGRAPH ABP, LONDON “Nothing to Lose VII” by Rotimi Fani-Kayode, part of a show of that artist’s work at the Walther Collection Project Space.